As the earliest animals to evolve flight, insects provide a unique model for studying the origin and evolution of wings and flight behaviours. Nevertheless, evolutionary analyses across diverse insect lineages remain limited. In addition, aerodynamic functional adaptation has often been emphasised as the primary factor shaping wing morphology, whereas the contributions of other factors, such as phylogeny and development, have rarely been considered in parallel with functional influences, or have readily interpreted as resulting from functional demands. This is largely due to the lack of a comprehensive framework for parallel analysis of their relative impacts on morphology. In this thesis, I apply a theoretical morphospace pipeline to a broadly sampled dataset of insect wing images, incorporating biomechanical estimation and phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate how function and phylogeny shape insect wing morphology. The three research chapters focus on the groups Neuroptera, Coleoptera, and Insecta, with each examining a different question: whether wing shapes undergo continual optimisation through deep geological time; whether conservative morphology necessarily indicates optimal forms; and providing a broad comparative view across the entire insect class. This thesis establishes a comparative framework for insect wing shape evolution and demonstrates that, in general, aerodynamic function is not the primary determinant of wing morphology, though clear signals of functional adaptation are evident in several lineages. It provides insights into how complex traits evolve under multiple and diverse evolutionary constraints.
The evolution of insect wing shapes: from the morphological and functional perspective
Liu, Y. (Author). 9 Dec 2025
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)